It was not hard to detect some gloating in the coverage of a recent study showing that older fathers are more likely to have children with schizophrenia. Though it was just one study, in a field -- schizophrenia research -- that is constantly producing new theories, for some people it was delicious proof that "men have biological clocks, too." Maybe the news would finally puncture what one female reporter termed the "brazen hubris" of older dads, who were assumed to be having children mainly to prove to the world that they weren't shooting blanks. Bear in mind that "older" in this study meant not just Strom Thurmond or Rupert Murdoch old but also men in their late 40's -- a group we are pretty well accustomed to seeing as first-time fathers, especially given that many of us first-time mothers are kind of long in the tooth ourselves.

Still, feminist commentators like Katha Pollitt and Gloria Steinem seemed to see the study as good news in a way, even if it did mean that more children might be at risk for a devastating disease. At the least, it was payback for the fact that "the woman," as Pollitt said, "is always blamed for everything." To Steinem, it was vindication: she had been trying for years, she said, to call attention to the health menace posed by swaggering dads pushing the frontiers of fertility. And even an author of the study couldn't resist an account of its implications that focused more on male egos than on schizophrenia. "While scientists have known for years that older fathers are a major source of gene mutations," Dr. Dolores Malaspina, a Columbia University researcher, said, "the public doesn't seem to have absorbed it, which may have something to do with a culture that sees older fathers as triumphantly virile."

It's strange how socially acceptable daddy-dissing can be, in some of the same contexts in which a teasing disrespect for, say, 40-something aspiring mothers would never be tolerated. But at least the crowing about male biological clocks recognizes a father's contribution. Most daddy-dissing -- which exists, it's true, alongside a veritable new industry of fathers' groups and daddying manuals -- is about the ineffectuality or irrelevance of dads. Consider the by now notorious recent study that put fathers who take care of their children in the same category as day-care centers and baby sitters -- as if fathers were interchangeable with paid professionals in a way mothers never could be. Similarly, a survey showing that in 1997 both fathers and mothers spent significantly more time with their children than they did in 1981 made front-page news a couple of weeks ago, presumably because it seemed to counter common assumptions.

Sometimes I guess we resort to daddy-dissing because life in two-earner households with children can be a strain, and it's good to let off steam. It's a conversational default setting, a kind of social glue, a way to feel friendly with women you may not know very well. Then there's the bigger picture: the late-70's vision in which large numbers of fathers and mothers really would trade sex roles certainly hasn't materialized, and for some people, any falling short of that makes it easy to ignore what so many fathers do contribute these days.

Women still do more child care, out of choice, necessity, the conviction that they do it better -- or some complicated blend of the three. Many fathers are absent altogether. And yet, as William Doherty, a family therapist, has said, "If you are a child, and your parents are together, married and reasonably happy, you have the best shot probably in human history to have an active, involved, loving father." Unfortunately, the people who write the most about the politics of family life often have ideological investments in either denying or bemoaning this fact. On the feminist left, the aim is to keep alive a certain bristling indignation about the battles yet to be won, the long, long distance men still have to go. As Cathy Young points out in her 1999 book, "Ceasefire!" there are feminists who argue, for instance, that divorced men who want custody of their children operate only out of selfishness and one-upmanship, whereas divorced women seeking custody operate only out of love. On the right, the ambition is to knock nurturing new-style dads. Hence the 1999 column by the conservative writer Danielle Crittenden in which she recorded her dismay not at fathers who have, say, ditched their kids but at those she sees dandling their babies at birthday parties. "I found myself trying to imagine these same men wearing green metal combat helmets, their faces streaked with mud, marching under the weight of guns and ammo packs, instead of diaper bags and baby carriers," she fretted. It's a variation on the old Madonna-whore syndrome: the new dad who can change a diaper and give a child a bath cannot, by definition, be masculine.

Sometimes I think my own father -- who was, I'll admit it, 60 when I was born -- was lucky to have lived at a time when his daily ministrations to his children didn't make a sociological type or a political straw man out of him. He was an actor, and at home a lot during the day. So while in public he resembled the 50's patriarch of right-wing nostalgia -- a cigar-smoking Republican Midwesterner and even a regular on "Ozzie and Harriet," as a matter of fact -- at home he was different, in some ways true to the stereotype and in other ways not. He made my breakfast and lunch every day and dropped me off and picked me up at school while my mother was at work. He was the more fastidious parent, finicky about clothes, preoccupied with the niceties and rituals of everyday life. He cut the crusts off my sandwiches, picked out sugar cookies in my favorite colors and froze little cans of juice so that when I opened them at recess they'd be cold with just a crunch of ice. He enjoyed it all, I'm pretty sure, and in the absence of daddy-dissing, there was really nothing to spoil it for him.